Shortages hit onco meds

The Adderall shortage gets the most press, but there are a lot more drugs in shortage — especially those for cancer patients. It’s a perfect storm of manufacturing problems, few companies making them, and little incentive for private industry to bother thanks to low profit margins.

There’s not much the FDA can do other than ‘quickly approving acceptable workarounds.’ As one FDA official put it, “[T]he underlying reality of this market remains what it is.”

Latest peanut-allergy treatment

The quest for a peanut-allergy preventative continues. The latest contender comes out of the University of North Carolina, where researchers have created a dissolving sublingual … lozenge? patch? that contains the equivalent of ¹ ⁄ ₇₅ of a peanut kernel.

In testing with (human) children, they found that the treatment, called SLIT (sub-lingual immunotherapy), protected kids from reactions to accidental peanut exposure for more than 17 weeks.

Important caveats: It’s not clear how often the kids take the treatment — possibly daily. And the kids who were desensitized had taken the treatment for 48 months, so it’s not a quick solution.

The Origin of Covid

All American info to be released

President Biden signed a bill — passed unanimously^* by Congress — requiring US agencies to declassify all information we have related to the origin of Covid-19. That presumably includes any reports in Biden’s Delaware garage or on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago nightstand.

Some data that could expose our intel-collecting methods would still be redacted, but you kinda have to wonder why we’re classifying this kind of information in the first place.

^* Holy moly!

Yet more data points to raccoon dogs

Chinese genomic data from the Huanan market in Whuan was uploaded to an international database and then removed, but it was available long enough for a group of American and French scientists to snag it and parse it.

The info it contained furthered the idea — which came out last week — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus jumped naturally, possibly from raccoon dogs.

The sequences showed that raccoon dogs and other animals susceptible to the coronavirus were present in the market and may have been infected, providing a new clue in the chain of transmission that eventually reached humans […]

“This adds to the body of evidence identifying the Huanan market as the spillover location of Sars-CoV-2 and the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Preparing for the bird flu

Seals, porpoises, bears, pigs — the “bird” flu (soon to be renamed bflu, right?) is infecting more and more mammals. It’s only a matter of time before it jumps to humans in a spreadable way.

Good news for those of us living in a rich nation: Vaccine makers are preparing or making the vaccine (or updating it to match the latest variants), and the countries that can are guaranteeing their supplies ahead of time. Just in case.

The polite word is chutzpah

The CEO of Moderna says that the $10 billion of US-taxpayer dollars given the company to develop its Covid-19 vaccine “played little role in the vaccine’s development.” It was private investors, he claimed, that paid for it.

Uh-huh.

This is his way of justifying jacking up the vaccine’s price by 400%. But of course he didn’t address the federally funded research that also helped develop the mRNA technology:

Moderna developed its vaccine with federal researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Moderna partnered with the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 2016 to create a general design for mRNA vaccines. In December, Moderna paid the NIH $400 million for borrowing a molecular technique developed by NIH researchers for the design of the company’s vaccine.

…nor the company’s $36 billion in vaccine sales. Nor the fact that Moderna conveniently left off the names of NIAID from its vaccine patent….

ICYMI: Stick with Woolite

If you have a lot of dry cleaning done, consider this: A new paper in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease explains that one of the popular chemicals used, trichloroethylene, is linked to Parkinson’s. (“Linked” doesn’t necessarily mean “causes” — more research is needed.)

TCE is lipophilic, meaning that it tends to dissolve in fatty tissues. Because of this, it is able to easily move into the brain and other body tissues and wreak havoc on cell mitochondrial function. Dopamine-producing cells are particularly sensitive to this type of toxin, which could explain why TCE exposure can lead to Parkinson’s disease.

Coffee drinkers: Trichloroethylene is also used in some decaffeination processes, so maybe look for “Swiss Water Process” instead….

The Long(ish) Read: Gut drugs to fight depression

The future of antidepressants could be drugs that adjust the gut microbiome.

One study found that taking a probiotic was associated with a reduction in negative mood. Another found that administering Bifidobacterium longum to patients with irritable bowel syndrome reduced depression, while 2022 research found that gut microbes are associated with levels of depressive symptoms.

Short Takes

From pandemic to endemic … finally?

“COVID-19 Deaths in U.S. Drop to Near Pandemic Low”: Last week saw 1,706 Covid-19 deaths in the US — the lowest number since March 25, 2020, and fewer than 250 Americans a day.

New eczema treatment

Two clinical trials have found that Eli Lilly’s lebrikizumab works well against atopic dermatitis, meaning the drug could soon have FDA approval and add to the arsenal of eczema treatments.